When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself. While helping repair the marooned time traveler’s glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his ten-year-old self, knowing everything he’d known at eighty and gives him access to advanced equations of space and time.But living life over knowing the future isn’t as easy as Cager has anticipated. His every action alters the future he remembers until much of what he remembers never happened at all. And those changes work against him at every turn, preventing him correcting the most serious mistake of his life. Now he must use his advanced mathematical ability to build his own time machine to go back and try again. But he needs a fortune even to begin.Then he receives help from a strange, young woman with no history. While perfecting time travel, Cager and his new partner overcome enormous problems, even being hunted by dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. After that, though, things get really bizarre.

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I'm so glad I stumbled on this book. Nay, glad that I stumbled on this author, because I have gone on to read another of his books, which is equally complex and interesting, and will probably read some of his others. But, back to The Gift of Time; the story pulled me in from the very first page and there's little to add to all of the other glowing reviews. The story is complex in its characters, concept and technical content. The world(s) he creates is/are so richly described that this reader got the feeling of actually being there. One of the things I found most satisfying was the author's take on the famous "going back in time and meeting yourself, or killing your own grandparent" paradox. His treatment of it seemed highly logical. There is humor in the blend too. I don't know if it was intentional on the author's part, but one of the walk-on characters is named Dr. Hofstadter, which made me wonder if it was perhaps a wry nod to 'The Big Bang Theory" TV show that has a character of the same name.

Evident even from the first few paragraphs, this book deftly balances offbeat humor, science fiction/fantasy, and the ways that love and a sense of personal responsibility drive the profound human need for a kind of karmic redemption.

The author's command of science (especially theoretical physics) is impressive to this lay reader and, I suspect, would be obvious even to experts in the field. So the time travel premise of the story seems entirely plausible in terms of a future that may be closer than we think (no pun intended.) Though the sci-fi elements are developed with enough detail to likely satisfy discriminating readers of the genre, they're not conjured for their own sake and always serve the deeply affecting, sometimes haunting story the author is telling.

The characters are endearingly idiosyncratic and individual. And even a few who make very brief appearances had me rolling with laughter.

All the previous reviews have said it all. A terrific book. I found it to be three stories actually, all tied together in the end. My only problem with it was the over the top explanations of scientific processes which were all Greek to me. I did a lot of skipping over in the last third of the book because of that. Other than that I thoroughly enjoyed the book, the well developed characters, a chance to do some things over and try to do it right. Of course, some things cannot be changed. A great understanding of human psychology and the goodness that we all, hopefully, possess. I highly recommend this very interesting visit to the past and back to the future as some would want it to be.

Odder still is that the author was able to cobble this disparate material into a reasonably coherent story. However, in spite of this commendable achievement, the lack of a central theme means the plot wanders all over the place until it finally........just.........ends.

Rather than a novel, I think "A Gift of Time" would have made a better collection of short stories.

After the initial time travel setup, I settled in to enjoy what seemed to be a well developed 'why you can never go back' story that nicely mixed nostalgia and pathos. It seemed that for every step our protagonist, Micajah Fenton, makes to correct his past mistakes, the universe conspires to slip him back one and a half step and not only undo his good work, but make the outcome worse.

And that was sweetly, distressingly charming until the underlying "we humans have retained something lost to the universe" proselytizing kicked in late in the novel. At that point the subtle tone was completely lost and I found myself skipping paragraphs because the outcome went from something with the potential for surprise to a blindingly obvious ending.

Which was a shame. Merritt had to opportunity to deliver a sophisticated story that used time travel to explore the very essence of being human. Instead, he ends up with a very mundane and emotionally blanched novel that felt more YA than Mature Audience.

Nearly eighty, Micajah Fenton had lived a full life and was going to end it when he met Lovely Pebble who had broken her time machine and needed local help to fix it. He provided that help and was rewarded with being able to go back to his teen year old self to fix some things in his life. Living his life over again didn't do much to fix things that seemed destined to repeat themselves despite his efforts. This gets him into some adventures that were fun until he takes a time machine to the Cretacious period where he breaks his time machine, and has to survive some dinosaurs. That was disruptive of the story which then went into overdrive to get finished. There had been good development of the characters up to this point. After this the characters become plastic and rushed to finish the story. The story ends with a message regarding the innate good of mankind. The story read well, but the author became rushed at the end to complete his story which could have been done better if he'd taken the time.